Friday, November 19, 2010

Travis: That Expensive Thing In Your Pants.



I love my Blackberry. I love it. Do I wish that I had a Droid X? Absolutely. But I have a good enough phone to keep me entertained and to offer multitasking during everyday occurrences. For the record: True multi-tasking is sending an email while taking a deuce. For all you know, I could be writing this while taking a deuce.

But what do these wonderful devices in our pockets actually cost? If you go to an AT&T store, and get the base standard iPhone, you will pay $200. Not bad right? My Blackberry Tour (far obsolete by now), was $50 with a resigned contract with Verizon. However I learned very quickly that these devices are far more expensive then we are lead to believe. Last spring I dropped my Blackberry and cracked the screen, leading a beautiful rainbow of incomprehensible color. It was depressing. However, my true sadness began when I found out what my Blackberry Tour “actuallly” costs.


My model at the time was posted on Amazon for $400, opposed to the $50 that I paid initially. It was mind blowing to discover the actual price of my cell phone when the service provider isn't subsidizing the cost. So this got me thinking. When all of our electronic devices are assembled overseas, what happens to the price of our phones when the labor powers in the USA take over the manufacturing of our wonderful devices? This answer was discovered in a statistic I heard recently.

Currently, $600 will get you a brand new iPhone 4G with no contract. The iPhone is developed here in the US, and is then assembled and imported overseas. However, if you were assemble the iPhone here in the USA, with unionized labor, an iPhone 4G would cost $5,000!


Because of America's high wages, high taxes, and union mandates, only the richest of the rich would ever be able to buy an iPhone (Though in our society, people would just throw it on a credit card and pay it for the next 15 years). So I have to ask what does this say about our labor market and future job growth? If everything is going digital, does that mean all of our manufacturing jobs will go too? Its a sad reality.

Finally, I would like to say Kudos! To our over regulated and over taxing government. Also Kudo's to unions, for demanding over reaching benefits, obscene retirement offerings, and $20+ per hour to push a button. Thanks to you, and the Indonesian guy who makes $1.50 an hour doing your same job, I get to own a Blackberry.

8 comments:

  1. Travis, I would also like to add a "thank you" to the greedy asshole factory owners in the early 1900's that made working conditions so abismal for employees that Unions had to be made. But unions certainly have become greedy themselves as well.

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  2. Unions are so stupid! The way they make sure you get lunch, keep you from working obscenely long hours, get compensation when one of these brilliant machines might hurt you, keeps upper management from firing you because they need your salary for a bonus, and makes your salary an amount that you can feed your kids off of. Yes, the union workers are the problem and the poor upper management and owners that are forced to play along with these unions are the ones being exploited. Thank God there are people in other countries who are willing to work in whatever conditions these factories deem "okay" and for whatever money they're willing to pay.

    Stupid government who thinks they're a business. Why can't they get funding for education, roads, and military from thin air? Why do they make citizens pay for the upkeep of their country?

    It's so ridiculous.

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  3. Since you are pro unions, Kacie, and since Travis has explained why all factory jobs won't exist in America down the road...are you saying we should stay the course?

    looks like an unstoppable force is heading straight for an immovable object...

    I don't think Travis is pro crappy work conditions and crap pay... he is just exercising his right as a consumer. should the government set all of our prices for us and tell us all what to buy? should we all just dump our money into the tax pot and divide it up evenly? (before you answer that consider the cons of eliminating the incentive financially of becoming the world's best brain surgeon or just unemployed)

    like it or not Kacie, Unions don't work, what would you have us do?

    no one is arguing the IDEA of unions is stupid. I think Smith is just pointing out how the REALITY of unions is failing miserably.

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  4. All unions aren't great but we know what happens when we don't have any. It's inaccurate to blame the cost of products on unions alone. A lot of money goes to unionized workers because there are so many of them. My dad is one of them and we have enough money to get by without too much stress but not much more than that. I want doctors and lawyers and the like to be able to pay off their years of schooling and to afford their insurance but that's not all their money is going to when they have second and third homes, yachts, extra vacations etc. I'd rather buy a more expensive product knowing that it's going to the well-being of a family than the second ski trip of a doctor's family. The "obscene retirement" packages are because most people don't have practices until they're senile. Instead, they have to retire when their bodies can't take it anymore and then not many people can get a job after that.
    And I feel bad for that Indonesian guy who has such a poorly paying job because that's the best he can get. We're exploiting them.

    Iphones are luxuries so expect to pay more for them.

    Unions are protecting the well-being of the majority of America. It may not be perfect but it's better than nothing.

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  5. "The way they make sure you get lunch, keep you from working obscenely long hours, get compensation when one of these brilliant machines might hurt you, keeps upper management from firing you because they need your salary for a bonus, and makes your salary an amount that you can feed your kids off of."

    -So basically without Unions we would all starve to death while working 100 hours per week while getting disabled and become poor.......Wow, Unions are FANTASTIC! Is there anything they can't do? I'm so glad we pay Billions of dollars to make sure an organization ensures this happens!

    -OR-

    We could keep our money and CHOOSE to work at a place that allows us to take lunch, work normal hours, buy our own disability insurance, and earn a wage to support ourselves. After all, we do have Personal Freedoms and Choice in this Country (For Now).

    I'm a Small business Owner and I have an employee that I pay a decent wage and benefits to. I don't make her work obscene hours, and yet there isn't a Union there holding a gun to my head making me do it. If I didn't do these things, she wouldn't work for me and my business would suffer. It's in my best interest to take care of her and this is our society now. We wouldn't stand for employers making us work under terrible conditions.

    Unions have nothing to do with this and in fact, do the opposite and hurt our economy and cost us jobs. Look at the UAW up in Detroit bankrupting GM. Janitors were making $80k+ up there. Nothing personal against Janitors, but you can't operate a business paying them that much. Or the Teacher Unions in New Jersey. Instead of taking a pay freeze this past year since EVERYONE ELSE HAS IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, the Unions insisted on 5% increase in salary. So the result since it wasn't possible with the current economy was that Teacher's lost jobs.

    Great Job Unions! Keep fighting the good fight!

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  6. Unfortunately, you're in the minority of business owners who care about their employees well-being and see it as something that benefits your company. Actually, small business owners tend to be like you and that is just one of the reasons why I appreciate them. Bigger business owners don't tend to be that way.

    Of course we can choose not to work there...but that would mean asking millions of Americans to quit their jobs in hope of a better one when the places that are actually hiring are these businesses that would take advantage of not having unions. While I wish we had the gumption to do that, I doubt the majority of America is willing to put their families in jeopardy hoping for a good outcome.

    Yes, without unions a lot of business owners will force people to work long hours with not so great pay and limit lunch break time. They'll also not care about the conditions of work environment because they don't have people working in their business with the power to force change. Unions were born because of all of these issues. They didn't just come out of thin air because someone thought, "Hey...why don't we form something we can all pay into just to screw our employers".

    That being said, not all unions are great and they're not all keeping the integrity they were born from which is awful. I agree, when people start asking for ridiculous things and using unions to keep themselves from getting fired over things they ought to be fired for, I get upset. But getting rid of them won't solve anything.

    We may live in the "land of the free" but when your family's well-being is at stake people tend to be put in crappy situations. All unions are not awful for us just like all unions are not wonderful.

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  7. There are laws in place to prevent bad work place conditions and to protect breaks. If the unions went away those laws would still be in place. A company that doesn't care about its workers probably wont succeed in America so I don't think we're in any danger of Indonesia work place environments.

    Greed is the fuel the union machine runs on. Its members feel they are entitled to luxuries they rarely earn. Unless we pay them so much money to put up with the mindlessness it takes to put three screws into a piece of metal for 8 hours a day. The American auto industry is on the verge of becoming irrelevant, and it took how much money from the govt to help them out? Gee, thanks union for creating part of the black hole I throw my tax dollars into.

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  8. It's an eventuality that we may never have to pay for anything ever again, but we will because we will have established a false sense of value in things.

    Jack V

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